Forging ahead with our posts on the lessons learned and inspirations gained at the 10th Annual YES Artists’ Conference: Business Skills for Creative Souls, here is the third installment from freelance writer, editor and proofreader Jacqueline Snider.
In this third post in the series, Jacqueline reveals more on the ideas and the thoughts and inspirations she came away from the conference with, this time it’s a bit more of a punk rock approach to doing business as a freelancer – the DIY method:
It was the actor on the YES Conference panel – Alain Goulem, Actor, Gemini Nominee – who spoke about the reasons why you should do things yourself if you can, mostly he said, because you learn invaluable skills when you perform a task yourself.
When you expect other people will do things for you all the time, you engage fully, and you don’t learn about the effort and the skills and other things that each task demands.
But when you’ve worked hard on something – perhaps it was volunteering, perhaps it was developing an aspect of your freelancing business – you’ll know how hard it is to get to the point of success. It takes a lot of nerve and a great deal of energy.
And in return, it also gives you credibility, because people see that you’re willing to work to get where you want to be, and they can see the kind of work that you do.
And I think that most people who are freelancing understand this.
But sometimes, you run into that person that thinks they are ‘all that’, the one that thinks they don’t need to do things for themselves.
You find them in all walks of life: they came out of school where they got amazing marks, or they just came off a contract where the client was impressed with their work, but for some reason they then think that the clients will be beating down the door and saying ‘We hear that your work is really amazing, we’d love to have you on board…’
But it isn’t like that at all.
It’s highly unlikely that anybody is going to chase you to get your work. If you want to be noticed, you have to get out there to market yourself, you yourself have to get out there and get things going.
You’ve got to do it yourself – because nobody is going to do it for you.
